Mixed media
90 x 50 x 10 cm
Unique Works
Certificate of Authenticity included
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This work explores the blurred boundary between the handcrafted and the industrial. Craft-based styles, once embedded with symbolic and functional meaning, have been reduced in today’s architecture and mass production systems to superficial decorative elements. Forms that once conveyed intention are now transformed into non-functional ornaments or directional signs, severed from their original contexts. In this installation, the artist hand-assembles industrial construction components—typically standardized metal fittings—into irregular, lattice-like structures. These materials, which suggest industrial efficiency and uniformity, are reinterpreted through manual processes that introduce subtle variations and irregularities. As their functional role is removed, the structures shift into surfaces, and the industrial materials are reframed through a craft-like sensibility. Installed along the corner of the wall, the work forms fragments that resemble parts of an architectural syntax. Removed from structure and utility, these physical clusters act as ornamental elements that generate a new spatial rhythm and reveal the intersection where industrial logic meets the language of craft. The work poses questions about how stylistic forms, once detached from their functions, are repeated, circulated, and reassembled. It also explores how industrial materials, through repetition and the intervention of the hand, can acquire new sculptural presence and systems of meaning.
Hong Woo-in has maintained a sustained interest in that which escapes language and exceeds understanding. Through the use of various aesthetic devices, the artist displaces subjects into realms of the incomprehensible. In doing so, the work resists viewing the world as a fixed and deterministic model, instead exploring its potential as a more fluid and open system.